Don't worry...

@Mike

Pass the info to the ISP and let them contact the user... LMAO! Oh tell me another one, that's too funny!

You're lucky if your ISP manages to keep a broadband connection up and running, let alone chasing anyone on their network who has been pwn3d!

The other year one of my email servers was on the receiving end of 20 thousand virus email a day from one IP, it took me 3 days of constant phone calls to the ISP before they stopped, and I think that was only because I finally found the number of their technical director by randomly changing some digits at the end of their DDI range.

@Chris Williams

What are you doing with your poor phone? I have an original (pre-8gig) N95 with it's original battery and it lasts days.

1) Make sure you have the latest firmware (free download and install from Nokia site), the very early firmware was bad with the battery.

2) If you don't need to use something, turn it off. e.g. Wifi, GPS, bluetooth and if you don't need 3G, switch to the old GPRS network, it's less of a power muncher

3) If you have no signal, e.g. on a tube, turn the phone offline. This goes for any mobile. If they can't see a cell they crank up their broadcast power and start screaming the wireless version of "HELLOOOO!"

4) Close down apps you're not using. Hold down the application button (the funny blue swirl) and you'll get the S60 equiv of alt-tab... Navigate up and down the list and you can press C to close them without having to go into each one.

What on earth...

What are the designers of these things thinking? I assume they had system designers?

They really don't show any signs of being able to understand the big picture of what their product is supposed to be doing!

Unless of course the big picture is that they want to be able to sell an election result to the highest bidder... In that case then they aren't even very good at designing a corrupt system.

Honestly, given all the flaws in the old system, I find it amazing that any state allows Diebold, or whatever they have renamed them selves to this month, to do anything more complex than make freebie calculators to put in cereal boxes.

BTW, I was confronted by a Diebold cash machine in Slovakia once... I was too frightened to use it!

That's what I thought...

I never saw the original survey, but it's good to know I wasn't wrong with my IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad choices. I'm on my 2nd. The first one only died because I broke the screen by treading on it (whoopsie!). It still works, but only on an external monitor.

Spares and drivers are easily available from the website. Replacing a keyboard I destroyed with a pint of beer was a doddle, plus the keyboard under tray design saved the motherboard from getting a wash.

I'm about to buy a new one (need more power - Call me Clarkson!). My only complaint (which can be directed at the entire laptop world, is the annoying tendency for everything to be widescreen. I love my current 1400x1050 screen, and would really prefer not to have a hugely wide monitor with a load of space I'll never use on each edge, whilst lacking vertical pixels...

@Anonymous Coward 26th 20:42

I wish I could have dodged getting one from Barclays... I tried to log on one day and was greeted by a request for an 8 digit number generated by the stupid thing... Not that they had bothered to send me one before locking me out of my own account! I had to phone them up and shout at them before they sent one out.

I find them a complete pain in the arse. If I go away and forget to take it, I'm completely screwed. I understand they want to appear to be more secure, but when their website asked me to create a password it insisted on 6-8 characters, then rejected any numbers, and also got upset about any symbols. Result you can only use a-z... Even then it gets upset it you have one letter repeated too many times, they could have made that more secure just be allowing longer passwords and *insisting* on some numeric characters!

So it's no shock that they're flawed... Banks are in the business of money, and we've all seen what a complete mess they have managed to make of that recently, so what hope was there that they would be able to do some IT with any degree of success!

and...

...if you go to google and type "coldplay torrent" you get 700,000+ results, with at least the first couple of pages linking to various torrent sites... Oddly enough TPB isn't in the first couple of pages.

@AC 24th February 2009 10:40 GMT

Last time I checked the tariffs, as an Orange UK customer visiting France, you are best off roaming onto any carrier other than Orange FR. I wonder if the France telecom owned network screws Orange FR customers as badly when they visit the UK?

Lenny vs Ubuntu

Well I've had my Thinkpad R52 dual booted for some time with XP and Etch... My only complaint was I couldn't get WPA2 wireless encryption to work.

When the latest Ubuntu appeared, with an improved network manager, I thought this might be my saviour and eagerly burnt off a DVD... It booted, and then hung on the front menu no matter what option I picked.

So I didn't hold out much hope for Lenny... I downloaded and burnt the network install CD and plugged in the CAT5... I wiped the Etch partitions and crossed my fingers.

It installed.

A couple of aptitude installs later (guided by some pages I found via google) and I had the centrino wireless working, and the new network manager, complete with WPA2.

So much for Ubuntu being consumer friendly version of Debian...!

Well done Debian, good installer!

Certainly far less of a battle than I have had with the other-half's Vista laptop and it's nForce chipset!

And before the wind0ze fanbois start chewing on me, I'm a window developer who only plays about with linux out of curiosity, but I'm long enough in the tooth not to be frightened of a command line, I used to program in MS-DOS after all.

As usual...

... the yank is ill-informed. Us Brits do still have the right to own firearms. What we don't have the right to do is own military weapons which have no use but to kill humans.

Pistols are an easily concealed personal protection sidearm of limited range which have no role in pest control or hunting. Therefore they are not permitted. Automatic weapons are designed for spraying an area. These too are not permitted. Learn how to shoot a rifle accurately and you don't need to loose off a whole clip to get that rabbit, or use a shotgun which will leave you something to cook in the pot.

No animal hunting or pest control is suitable for an uzi, a Barrett 50mm, an M16 or an AK47. So Mr Yank, if you own one, what exactly are you planning it use it for?

Black helicopter as it's probably privately owned by someone called Randy and equipped with weaponry that would make Arnie envious!

Don't forget...

All the dynamic DNS sites and systems that rely on a short TTL.

I use dyndns to access my server at home. My old aluminium pair is a little unreliable despite being less than 3km from the exchange, so daily disconnects and new IP assignment are a common occurrence. Without dyndns support provided by my router, I wouldn't be able to find where my server had ended up!

Is he available for hire?

The UK visitors to the US site...

"more 100,000 UK users visited Yelp's original US incarnation over the past month"

Yes, and every single one of them only ended up on the Yelp page because something they searched for happened to be on that page... They quickly discovered they were on an American site and left as it was irrelevant to them.

I hope...

... that as "the tested Tesla was filmed being pushed into the shed in order to show what would happen if the Roadster had run out of charge." we can expect Top Gear to be pushing the latest BMW Wanky Truffle Tourer (with optional black everything) into the garage in a future episode to show what would happen when that runs out of petrol?

@Mike and @E

I think you'll find drive storage has been given the base 10 spin for many many years, even back to the days of 100K floppy drives in the early-mid 80s... That's as far back as my memory goes, I wouldn't be in the least surprised if it was even older.

Back in those days the small missing 2.4% wasn't noticed, however now it's been compounded by the rounding of first Kilo, Meg, Gig... 2.4 x 2.4 x 2.4... and people notice 13% missing!

I love American law...

Look at that fine... There was no mention of lost sales, or how many people (if any) downloaded it, yet they manage to justify a level of fine which, lets face it, will have most people filing for bankruptcy! I'm sure the legal fees are even larger.

Ug!

I don't know if it's the IBM Access connection on my R52 ThinkPad, but when I installed it just now it blue screened XP Pro.

After it rebooted none of my network connections worked, cabled or WiFi... Even worse PSI wasn't even showing on the add/remove programs list. Luckily, just I was considering a manual through the registry removal (eeek), I spotted it had an uninstall exe in the program directory (no shortcut on start menu).

I don't see the problem...

Hmmmm

The way the TV news is playing this, you'd think that half the met were members.

From my quick look through the list, searching for the word "police", I found only one who might possibly still serving. The remaining ones, which I believe number under 20, are all retired or ex-police.

As for teachers, well they are entitled to their own private beliefs, just as long as they can perform their teaching roles fairly (if they couldn't then surely all the gov league tables and nanny state measurements would have found them by now).

Careful where you leave it...

There are enough places in the UK where you can't guaranty your wheels will still be on your car after being away from it for 5 minutes, can you imagine the field day the little oiks would have with that moped?! Hell, they'd just pick it up and walk off with it!

No change...

Until the card issuers enforce the same kind of authentication across every country on earth, none of this will ever do any good.

Chip and PIN was supposed to stop fraud, but all that happens is the card gets cloned and then either used in the "customer not present" manner, or it gets used in another country where PIN authentication isn't used. These non-PIN countries are alarmingly near, just a quick RyanAir flight (crash landings permitting) away!

@Urs Keller

What do other ("Real") phones do?

Easy, they only let you dial 999,112 or 911 (depending on where you are), and they've been like that for years, ever since someone first came up with the key lock idea, and someone else pointed out that it might be useful for someone else to be able to use your phone to call for help if you're not able to following an accident. Although these days the odds are that the other person will have their own phone. Gives you an idea how long this has been standard for "Real" phones.

So yet again the outside "Ooooh, pretty" laminate of the iPhone has been scratch to reveal a pitiful understanding of what exactly a phone does, and how people use them... Did Apple not think to have a look at another telephone to see if they could learn something before making their attempt? Then they might have given it a flash, more than a 2 megapixel camera, and MMS support too.

Honestly, the "know your customer" department in Apple must consist of an empty room with a mission statement across the wall saying "Don't worry, they'll buy anything with a fruit logo stuck on it".

Geeez...

A crease looks like a black arrow used to indicate the choice?!

WTF? Everywhere else on the planet, multiple choice exam papers have been processed for years without a problem... How I hear you ask... well you colour in a box with solid ink... The papers have machine readable calibration marks up the side, and along the top, and amazingly these machines can read multiple choice exam sheets with 50 questions, each with 5 possible answers en mass.

Why on earth can't the 'merkins manage to make a system that can read one mark out of a possible 5 (I assume America has the occasional joke independent like we do in the UK) is beyond me...

Hmm...

Not sure I understand the politics involved, but anything that gets the views of the non-technical user to the techies can only be good.

Linux will never break into the big time desktop market if common configurations continually require running for the console. Laptop centrino wireless for example. Sure, *I* know this is due to the non-open source drivers, but does a non-techie user really care? They would just like their laptop to work via wifi... In fact *I* would like my laptop to work via wifi... /me mutters about wpa2...

Details sketchy...

...but reading between the lines it looks like whatever was on this storage key were log in details shared between more than one system or person...

Security 101... You don't share log on information between more than one system/user... That way when you *do* loose the info, you can just cancel one account and not have to wipe out the entire system for a weekend.

"Accused"...

The most frightening phrase... "accused of stealing content"...

How about a right of appeal... Oh hang on... The RIAA will be pumping out the automated "accusations" at such a rate, that the ISPs would collapse under the weight of having to perform a real investigation, especially with their track record of accuracy.

I wouldn't be surprised if right to internet access would fall under the human right legislation, so France call break a few more EU rules too.

Hmmmm....

So....

"The addition of the hard-drive tuner box, available free by redeeming a voucher, goes some way to redressing this."

What a pain in the arse way of doing things... You'll have to buy the screen, have it sitting on the floor, send off the voucher, wait two weeks for the tuner box to arrive, then finally be able to mount the thing on the wall and run all the cables.

Ummm....

I could see the Royal Society of Physics (if it exists), coming up with this, but would have thought the Royal Society of Chemistry would rather play with with a more chemically interesting metal... It's not like Gold actually does much, or reacts with much.

Now if it was a load of sodium, I could see the Chemists rubbing their rubber gloves together at the idea of playing with that (whilst donning safety goggles).

Oh come on...

Honestly...

Do these tw*ts really have nothing better to do?!

How did the meeting going "Right guys, we haven't had our name in print for several months, we need to come up with something to prove that we still exists, get us some column multiple of 25.4mm and generally keep us in a job for the next 12 months".

How about just sort out the pricing so that a half is *HALF* the price of a pint. Then take this to Europe too... The other week I was paying 85p for a large and 76p for a small in Poland. Outrageous!